William Burroughs, Unabomber
(W.B. Flies to Berkeley, CA)
Jacques Debrot
William Burroughs is shooting up in the living room of his haunted bungalow in Lawrence, Kansas when the cab he’s hired to take him to the airport pulls into the driveway. There’s no rush, though. The driver can wait. Burroughs hasn’t left the house in over a month. Gaunt, wooden-faced, he removes the needle from his foot and limps to the bedroom. Stacks of big bills are piled high on the single bed. $200,000, the advance for his latest novel, The Western Lands. He slips some cash into his undertaker’s uniform, a black suit with trick pockets, and reaches for his overcoat. His shoes have knives that spring from the toe when he presses his heel down.
It had sleeted the night before, but the sky is very bright now. The driver carries the larger of Burroughs’ two bags to the cab and Burroughs follows with the smaller one, a red vinyl valise. In the wide side yard, cul-d-sac’d against an acre of bog and skinny pine trees, a pair of targets hangs from a pulley system. Beneath it, the sun-flattened snow, shining like plastic, is moonpocked with dozens of spent bullet casings.
Burroughs gets into the rear of the cab directly behind the driver, a big, middle-aged man with a biker’s beard divided at the chin into two braids, and stares out the window. The red valise is on his lap. Inside, he’s stashed a twist-tied baggy of pharmaceutical samples—some Demerol, Dilaudid, an airplane liquor-sized bottle of Tripelennamine—and a bomb. The design’s more sophisticated than that of his previous devices, but not radically different, essentially, just a couple of pounds of smokeless powder packed inside a galvanized pipe with a rubber-band-and-nail trigger. Still, explosives are tricky things, difficult to refine. And Burroughs’ early prototypes have maimed more people than they’ve killed.
As they approach the outskirts of Kansas City, the weather changes and it’s suddenly snowing. Nothing more than a brief, intense flurry, but under its wingbeats, the traffic slows and thickens. Burroughs glances at his watch, clears the fogged-in window and looks out at the stalled interstate. In a cab you can always slit the driver’s throat and take control, he thinks. His heart is beating harder than normal, but he only feels enervated and unreal.
Two days later, in a hotel suite in California, Burroughs is half-watching a TV news broadcast about the latest university bombing. One person dead (decapitated, apparently), two injured: Thought Control scientists, Agents of Humwawa God of the Black Hole. Sprawled across the bed in a metal jockstrap, Burroughs shakes out a half-grain of heroin onto a square of aluminum foil. Then he mixes in some cocaine from the Ziploc resting on his stomach, heats the foil with a cigarette lighter, and inhales the vapor, the rest of which floats eerily around the room like a probing tentacle.